Memoirs aren’t really my thing. It’s not easy for me to leave the present behind and immerse myself in the past in order to understand my life in all its strangeness. I have lived many lives.  Throughout the years, I have looked always for the unusual, for the wonderful, for the mysteries at the heart of life.

When I was little, I was sent to live with a family in the country while my family was overseas. I became a farmer’s child, run wild, my mother and brother were beautiful strangers from whom I ran away when they would come visit.  The lawlessness of the early years made me unfit for following rules later.
I ran away from a later boarding school and wandered all over Europe, sleeping in a haystack one night, in a castle another.  I demanded nothing from those countries other than permission to slip under their skin.  But that was between the wars.

I could tell you about what appear to be several separate lives coming together like multiple dog leashes in my hand.  Right now, much of it recedes into the fog of disinterest.  This is where I am instead: it’s the evening of the12 August 1961.
My husband Walter and Willy Brandt, mayor of Berlin are singing loudly.

“Es rettet uns kein hö´hres Wesen,
kein Gott, kein Kaiser, noch Tribun.”

Their shadows intermittently obscure the pink and orange forms floating freely in a shallow but open-ended green space behind them. It's a weightless world where the forms are defined by a drawn line, trembling with a kind of ecstatic intensity as it slashes and swoops through the field of blurred, glowing colors. It all  slows down quickly when the phone rings. Walter’s swinging glass of whiskey in front of his chest halts like the staff of leader of a marching band whose musicians have absconded suddenly.

Everyone in the room respectfully freezes to allow for the answering of the phone.

Horrifyingly, tall Walter, who had to stoop for the phone, seemed to shrink into his shirt, “Willy,” he whispered hoarsely as he pulled the receiver cord too far and the phone crashed onto the carpet.  While Willy talked, Walter filled us in: The East Germans had started constructing a wall through Berlin. They had shut all roads to the city and the Mayor had to go home right now.

After that, I have two different memories, maybe due to the anxiety. In the first version, the Mayor got off the phone, then leaned over to me and thanked me for the lovely dinner.  In the second, the Mayor stood and thanked everyone in our living room for the great evening. Everyone started talking and shouting like the fourth grade at recess.  Here, the memory fades. I know that the Mayor eventually left for Berlin in a canvas-covered firetrap of a biplane we borrowed from the cranky janitor in the morning fog of Nuremberg airfield.